Saledovil

@Saledovil@sh.itjust.works

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨9 months after its 1.0 launch flopped, an indie dev just learned that Steam never emailed the 130,000 people who wishlisted its game⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thing about wishlist is, I treat it more as a “Games I found vaguely interesting at first glance” rather than a “Games I want to play” list. I assume I’m not alone in this matter. Of 214 games on my wishlist, there’s like 3 I’d play right now if they were gifted to me. 2 that I’d buy. So, assuming 1% of people who wishlisted a game will buy it on launch, that would have been 1368 sales (rounding up). Assuming the game cost 20$ at launch (it currently costs ~14$), that would be 27360$ from launch day sales. Nice payday, but not if you have to work 10 years to get it (also taxes and steam’s cut, so that number would actually be much lower)

  Thing is, just because you worked hard on something doesn’t guarantee that it will be good and/or popular.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fuck you in particular⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Paint a cup handle, some of the side where it is attached to the cup black, so that it looks like the cup has no handle.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit lost it⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Thing is, Lemay is the pocket.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What If There’s No AGI?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  What if we’re not smart enough to build something like that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Years ago while drunk and high I sent my sister a syphilis plushy.⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I gave my sister food poisoning.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SpaceX says states should dump fiber plans, give all grant money to Starlink⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Problem with Starlink is that the satellites need to be replaced every 5 years or so.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, but my point was that our current economic system can’t deal with, not that we can’t deal with it in general. Migrating away from the current system would require the powerful to give up their power, which they won’t do willingly, even as the walls are closing in. (In fact, when it comes to global warming, the walls are closing in).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, why are declining birth rates not a problem?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not shrinking yet, the birth rate is declining, and the world population is projected to start declining 2050.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe. Could also be that humans never invent anything that comes close to a biological brain. Either because we simply aren’t smart enough, or because civilization regresses before we get there. And there’s several trends going on currently which could cause civilization to regress. For example, climate change and declining birth rates (While we could set up an economic system that can deal with a shrinking and aging population, our current one cannot).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It actually does have a cost incurred on them via increased wear and tear and warranty claims.

  The customer friendly way to deal with this would be put in a limiter, and write in the contract “Warranty void if limiter removed”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forget Netflix, Volkswagen locks horsepower behind paid subscription⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Here’s an interesting graphic: fiets.uk/…/cost_of_commute-1024x713.jpg

  It states that for every dollar you pay to drive your car, society pays 9.20$. Implications being that if driving a car wasn’t subsidized, the costs would be 10 times as big.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So, you admit that it was funny?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d ask you to read the Wikipedia disambiguation page on scaling (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaling), but you’re likely too scared to consider anything that doesn’t conform to your simplistic worldview.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I said “scaling” not “scale”. “Scaling” refers to how output and expenses of the enterprise behaves as it becomes bigger or smaller. Threeduck seems to think it means “big”. And then immediately refers the holocaust for some reason.

  Though, the term is broad, hence why I asked them about how they interpret the term.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Do you know what I mean by “scaling”? Because going by your reply, you don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fact-Checking Trump’s Epstein Defenses: In face of mounting discontent over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, President Trump has turned to deflection, denial & downplaying⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  This means he’s mentioned so often in the files, that it’s impossible to edit all of it out.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Current genAI? Never. There’s at least one breakthrough needed to build something capable of actual thinking.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Death Industry sounds like it would be an awesome band name.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Animal agriculture has significantly better utility and scaling than LLMs. So, its not hypocritical to be opposed to the latter but not the former.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  He’s also already admitted that they’re out of training data. If you’ve wondered why a lot more websites will run some sort of verification when you connect, it’s because there’s a desperate scramble to get more training data.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will not disclose GPT-5’s energy use. It could be higher than past models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s safe to assume that any metric they don’t disclose is quite damning to them. Plus, these guys don’t really care about the environmental impact, or what us tree-hugging environmentalists think. I’m assuming the only group they are scared of upsetting right now is investors. The thing is, even if you don’t care about the environment, the problem with LLMs is how poorly they scale.

  An important concept when evaluating how something scales is are marginal values, chiefly marginal utility and marginal expenses. Marginal utility is how much utility do you get if you get one more unit of whatever. Marginal expenses is how much it costs to get one more unit. And what the LLMs produce is the probably that a token, T, follows on prefix Q. So P(T|Q) (read: Probably of T, given Q). This is done for all known tokens, and then based on these probabilities, one token is chosen at random. This token is then appended to the prefix, and the process repeats, until the LLM produces a sequence which indicates that it’s done talking.

  If we now imagine the best possible LLM, then the calculated value for P(T|Q) would be the actual value. However, it’s worth noting that this already displays a limitation of LLMs. Namely even if we use this ideal LLM, we’re just a few bad dice rolls away from saying something dumb, which then pollutes the context. And the larger we make the LLM, the closer its results get to the actual value. A potential way to measure this precision would be by subtracting P(T|Q) from P_calc(T|Q), and counting the leading zeroes, essentially counting the number of digits we got right. Now, the thing is that each additional digit only provides a tenth of the utility to than the digit before it. While the cost for additional digits goes up exponentially.

  So, exponentially decaying marginal utility meets exponentially growing marginal expenses. Which is really bad for companies that try to market LLMs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Techcrunch reports that AI coding tools have "very negative" gross margins. They're losing money on every user.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Venture capitalism is when you give somebody money to start a business in hopes that they make it big, giving you really valuable equity for relatively little money. What you’re thinking of is blitzscaling. Scale up in an unsustainable way in order to gain market dominance, so that you can use that to become profitable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People were mad because they lost their AI boyfriend after GPT-4o deprecation⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  So, those things are going backwards.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tucson City Council votes 7-0, unanimously to kill AI Data Center⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I doubt a microchip that doesn’t need cooling, while still calculating reasonably fast, is possible.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This boomer couple would be hit with $700,000 tax bill if they sold their mansion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Not if you need it to buy a house.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This boomer couple would be hit with $700,000 tax bill if they sold their mansion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The fact that the house is woth that much in the first place. Thing is owning a single home doesn’t make you rich, since you need a home to life, you can’t get that money unless you’re willing to downgrade. Now these people are, but the tax is limiting their options. Real estate should be taxed while you have it, not when you sell.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK Iranian developers have created an open-source censorship bypass solution that works on desktop and mobile.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The fact that this image is in the repo in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta touts 'superintelligence' for all as it splurges on AI⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The whole exponential improvement hypothesis assumes that the marginal cost of each improvement stays the same. Which is a huge assumption.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg writes a manifesto on bringing "personal superintelligence" to everyone to improve humanity, but doesn't even define what superintelligence means.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  A superintelligence would likely quickly become the sovereign of the earth. And it’s generally a good idea to kill the old elite after conquering a nation, then install new ones. The new ones will like you, because you made them rich, and they’ll fear you, because you killed off all of their predecessors. Of course, there’s also the risk that a super intelligence would just do away with humans in general. But anybody holding significant power right now is much more at risk.

  And we can’t forget that we currently can’t even build something that’s actually intelligent, and that a super intelligence might not actually be possible.